Please Help Me Fix perlanet

But if you look at any of my planets (e.g. Planet Westminster), you'll see that all is not well. My software isn't handling encoding very well and currently it's not acting as a very good advert for Perl.

I know that I really need to get stuck in and work out exactly where I'm going wrong, but currently I don't have enough spare time. So I was hoping that someone who knows more about this stuff than I do would be interested in having a look and suggesting some fixes.

CPAN-RPM Mailing List

At the end of my "Perl in RPM-Land" talk at YAPC::Europe, I sketched out an idea about automatically generating RPMs from CPAN modules. I fully expected people so tell me that I was talking nonsense, but it seems that a number of other people had been thinking along similar lines.

In order to carry on the discussion, I've set up a mailing list. Please subscribe if you're interested in this subject.

I've also submitted a talk to the London Perl Workshop to report on the project's progress. This is known as Conference Driven Development - I now need to ensure that we've made some kind of progress to prevent this presentation from being very embarrassing.

YAPC::Europe Copenhagen 2008

I've just got back to my hotel room following the conclusion of this year's YAPC::Europe conference. As always, the conference was just the right mix of usefulness and fun. The organisers can be very proud of themselves.

I gave three talks at the conference. They were all on the last day, and I have put all of the slides on Slideshare. The three talks were:

I seem to have come away having committed myself to three projects. The first is completely my own fault - the Proud To Use Perl talk has an associated web site which I am planning to keep up to date. The second is partly my fault. My RPM talk ended with a rough outline of a madcap scheme to automatically turn all of CPAN into RPMs. Jos Bauman was in the talk and this idea seems to have piqued his interest. So I suspect I'll be heavily involved with that. The third project wasn't my idea at all (I'm just helping out because it's an area that I'm interested in). I'll leave the announcement of more details of that to the other people involved.

It's been an... er... interesting ten years. The group's success has far exceeded my wildest dreams. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to make london.pm the weird and wonderful group that it is.

And here's to the next ten years.

Wednesday July 16, 2008

06:09 AM

Perl Teach-In Copenhagen

These tutorials include me running the Perl Teach-In that I originally ran at the BBC last summer. It'll be (lightly) updated of course. This will be running on Tuesday 12th August - the day before the conference.

Also on Tuesday, Gabor Szabo will be running "QA Test Automation using Perl" and on the Saturday following the conference you can choose between brian d foy's "Mastering Perl" and Josh McAdam's "Practical Test-driven Development".

Update: Thanks to Lars Thegler for pointing out the errors in the above. There are actually three tutorial days. Gabor and I are both running courses on Tuesday, brian's course is on Saturday and Josh's is on Sunday.

Sorry about that.

Tuesday July 01, 2008

05:21 AM

CPANTS Success

It's taken a bit longer than I hoped, but I have finally beaten the CPANTS game. From about an hour ago all of my CPAN modules score 100% and I'm therefore (along with a number of other people) top of the CPANTS league.

Of course, they'll probably introduce some new measures soon and I'll have to start all over again.

Now, given my awesome CPANTS score, who wants to come on one of my Perl courses?